Alexandrian Sphinx

The Hidden Life of Constantine Cavafy

De: Peter Jeffreys, Gregory Jusdanis

Narrado por: Jeremy Booth

A gripping and revealing new biography of one of the greatest of modern poets, the queer, Greek-Egyptian Constantine Cavafy, whose admirers have ranged from E.M. Forster, T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf to Jackie Onassis, Leonard Cohen and Stephen Fry.

In this illuminating book, Peter Jeffreys and Gregory Jusdanis reveal Cavafy as a troubled, brilliant poet who sacrificed love for his art and changed the course of world poetry. Alexandrian Sphinx chronicles the extraordinary story of his family, the vicissitudes of their fortunes, and their eventual poverty when they left Egypt and moved to Liverpool, London and Istanbul. As the poet reached adulthood, his story centred on his beloved Alexandria, the city that nourished his imagination and became for him a metaphor of both his poetry and modern life. Deep archival research uncovers the poet’s relationships with his teenage companions, his friends of middle age, and the individuals whom in later life he enlisted in his steadfast pursuit of fame.

Alexandrian Sphinx tells not only of Cavafy’s life but of his work and his artistic journey, from his early poetic experiments to his startling reinvention in middle age, when he renounced much of what he had written and developed a radical new poetics. Erotic, philosophical, and linguistically suggestive, this widely imitated yet singular style is now recognized and revered as Cavafian.

A PDF is included with this audiobook.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2025 Gregory Jusdanis and Peter Jeffreys (P)2025 Summit Books UK

Reseñas de la Crítica

"‘In the fifty years since a biography of the poet last appeared, Constantine Cavafy has emerged as an essential poet of modernity on the world stage. Gregory Jusdanis and Peter Jeffreys have given us an extraordinary biography, eminently readable and as unconventional, scholarly, and impassioned as its subject." (Mark Doty, author of My Alexandria)

"A painstakingly researched biography of a quiet Alexandrian who left few traces of his life but whose body of poems the world worships and never tires of translating" (André Aciman, author of Out of Egypt and Call Me by Your Name)

"Cavafy spoke for young men with big desires and little money, excluded from society and consumed by love and lust. In his maturity he turned all those wasted nights into the work of a world genius." (Edmund White, author of A Boy’s Own Story andThe Loves of My Life)